A lovely exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum highlights both mastery and medium. By Sara Evans

The Brooklyn Museum is celebrating spring with a dazzling display of the watercolors of John Singer Sargent, (1856-1914). Comprising the combined holdings of this museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, this treasure trove has no less than 93 watercolors and nine oils on view. Most of these paintings have not been seen by the public for decades.
The exhibition will travel to Boston after Brooklyn. Sargent regarded his watercolors as a single—and singular—work, and wanted them sold as a unified group. When they were displayed in a landmark exhibition and sold by the late, lamented Knoedler and Co. gallery in Manhattan in 1909, the Brooklyn Museum wisely snared 83 of them for a mere $20,000, or about $500,000 in today’s dollars. The money for most of the purchase was raised by special subscription and was a popular cause among wealthy Brooklynites. (Do the math: that’s $240 and change apiece. Even by 1909 measures, it was one of the great art bargains of all time.) Three years later, the Boston Museum of Fine Art bought a group of 45 of Sargent’s watercolors for about $10,800.
As a medium, watercolor is often regarded as a lesser or inferior medium to oil painting. In reality, watercolor is its own medium, and actually much more difficult. With oils, one can tweak, re-work and modify endlessly, covering up, changing and improving to one’s heart’s content. Once watercolor is on the page, that’s pretty much it. There is little room or chance for modification. It takes huge mastery to get it right. For Sargent, watercolor was liberating, a way of artistically traveling light. While he had always made watercolors, after 1900, they became his dominant medium.
Sargent was arguably the most successful portrait painter of his era, an era of great wealth and the formation of significant fortunes. As a painter, he was in great demand, both in Europe and America. For decades, he traveled from London to Boston, New York to Paris, painting the men and women, children and dogs of the Gilded Age. And he was good at it, very, very good at it. There was the scandalous Mme. X from New Orleans, whose provocative cleavage caused such a stir in both America and Europe that she demanded a do-over, in a high-necked beige gown, which hangs in the Gibbs Museum in Charleston. There were the charming yet enigmatic daughters of Bostonian Edward Darley Boit. Sargent painted such luminaries as Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. He painted countless British and Italian aristocrats, and a raft of newly minted American millionaires and Boston Brahmins. But portraiture, especially the lucrative kind that Sargent was master of, is essentially a form of flattery. (There are no ugly Sargent portraits.) And by the turn of the century, he was pretty burned out.
He had made his fortune—and watercolor was his passport, his ticket out. A compulsive traveler, watercolor enabled the artist to travel far and wide—and to travel light. For the first time in a long and illustrious career, John Singer Sargent was finally painting for himself, painting what he wanted to paint, where he wanted to paint it.
Spain and Morocco, Italy, the Alps, the Holy Land, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Spain and Majorca, all awaited his artist’s eye and brilliant brush.
He painted beggars and Bedouins, goatherds, gondoliers, tramps and fishermen. He painted Arabs and Italians. He painted himself painting, lovely ladies and good friends. He painted mountains and quarries, staircases, bridges, laundry, fountains and gardens, brooks and seas. He painted magnolias, gourds and pomegranates. No aspect of nature or of human work escaped his painterly hand and eye.
A lot of the watercolor work is loose and impressionistic, surprisingly modern and leaning towards abstraction. They are a clear change from the formalistic demands of oil portraiture. There is a lightness of brushwork and color, reflecting the artist’s reclaimed freedom from oils.
The exhibit does a terrific job of exploring the multimedia techniques that Sargent used in many of his watercolors. While most are simply watercolor laid on paper, many are much more complex. He often used photography as a preliminary way of exploring his subjects. He tilted umbrellas to get the light just right. He often sketched with graphite, used a variety of textured papers, and most unusually, used clear wax in his watercolors, which adds depth and dimension while also serving as a barrier for the running together of colors.
Watercolor was Sargent’s rich reward for a lifetime of oil portraits. The current exhibit demonstrates that this was a happy and productive time in the artist’s life, a time when roaming was his pleasure and watercolor his medium. In their endless explorations and travels, these paintings reflect the joys of a life well lived.

(The exhibition is on view at the Brooklyn Museum from April 5 to July 28, and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from October 13 to January 20, 2014. A beautiful book accompanies the exhibit.

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